Semantics over Safety: The Case of Substantially Equivalent

Coming across this Atlantic article in my Google Reader, I was reminded of another interesting move that enabled the release of GMO crops into our food system.

In order to get GMOs to market faster at their launch, the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) proposed a regulatory approval concept called “Substantially Equivalent” that would allow new food products that were, you guessed it, ‘substantially equivalent’ to bypass food safety due diligence processes and research. This fast track label was accepted by the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) first, and is now widely used as an easy judgement tool by agencies including the USDA and the United Nation’s Food and Agriculture Organization.

To be deemed substantially equivalent, the new food product is assessed on the similarities of the resulting product of the new manufacturing process to the natural product. GMO crops are deemed to be the same as natural crops, as they look and behave similarly. However, the fact that our understanding of DNA is a relatively new science means that we don’t have enough information to deem the process of genetic modification safe, regardless of what the plant does or looks like. 

The Atlantic article mentioned above highlights a study released by Chinese researchers affiliated with the Nanjing Unversity. The Nature magazine published study shows microRNA has the ability to change actions of its organism, resulting in unseen but influential consequences. mRNA has been known for years to drive many human diseases, including cancer.

So what’s truly going on behind the scenes of your GMO garden burger, potato chips, or corn-fed steak? GMO manufacture Monsanto is not interested in telling us or finding out, as they are publicly against testing their products for human consumption, saying that because DNA is a natural substance, its manipulation inherently poses no risks.

The Food Safety section of Monsanto’s website states:

There is no need for, or value in testing the safety of GM foods in humans. So long as the introduced protein is determined safe, food from GM crops determined to be substantially equivalent is not expected to pose any health risks. Further, it is impossible to design a long-term safety test in humans, which would require, for example, intake of large amounts of a particular GM product over a very large portion of the human life span. There is simply no practical way to learn anything via human studies of whole foods. This is why no existing food—conventional or GM—or food ingredient/additive has been subjected to this type of testing. 

This means that we, the consumers, cannot be guaranteed that the foods we eat have been tested for our safety or that the externalities of the sciences used to develop them are understood - or are currently even being tracked. 

Given that 94% of soybeans and up to 75% of corn grown in the US is GMO, and an estimated 70% of US processed foods contain these crops, the acceptance of these foods without understanding on the part of our regulatory agencies is an outrageous and unforgivable threat to our health.

What can we do, as simple bystanders to the conversion of our food supply? Support organics. Know that your food is certified as not containing GMO. Don’t buy-in to the ethanol craze. And eat meat that’s been fully grassfed, or supplemented with certified organic feed.